"Are you grieving? Here’s what I learned from Batman and Mantel’s Cromwell and Katrina Trask of Yaddo. Don’t worry about how other people might perceive your process or what they think of you. Don’t worry about the quality and texture of your heart. Don’t worry about inspiring anyone, or how to be a model of someone else’s idea of resilience and survival. Show that you are broken. Let them see you sweat and scream. Own your disaster; make it into a lake, build for it a shrine — not to show your strength but to show your weakness, which is a way of showing that you are yet human, that you are not yet lost. Shine the sign of your struggle into the sky. And then light it up."

i hope that one day emily rapp comes out with a book of essays from this period of her life, and then i will buy it and read them, some for the second or third time, and then my book will be ruined because of all the tears spilled on its pages while i weeped uncontrollably. in the meantime here is her latest, obviously recommended — basically i can never recommend anything more strongly than the latest essay by emily rapp — in which she talks about batman and grief and why the myth of strength born from grief is bullshit. except she says it much more wonderfully than that.

(Source: isabelthespy)